= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
SarahC comments on Other people's procedural knowledge gaps - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (47)
Related: I'm often shocked that people don't use common sense to handle situations where they don't have complete and explicit knowledge. It seems that some folks don't have the confidence to try muddling through in unfamiliar situations.
Languages are a good example.
The only foreign language I've actually studied systematically in school is French. And yet: I can understand a newspaper article in Spanish, get a printer that's stuck in Dutch language mode back to English, use an Italian book as a reference for an art history paper, understand the lyrics to a Yiddish song, and navigate the subway in a German-speaking city.
It's just using cognates and common sense. But people always act shocked, and seem to think that if you haven't studied a language in school you have to be completely helpless.
Software is another example. Give me a new piece of software and I'll muddle around and see what the buttons do, like a normal person. Apparently many office workers demand an official tutorial and won't even touch the software until they've been "taught" to use it.
I wonder if they could be "taught" to use this:
My father is consistently amazed at my ability to successfully execute this algorithm several orders of magnitude faster than he can. Often I solve his problem by pointing out something on the same screen that he's been staring at for fifteen minutes.
(He should find some way of hiring himself out as a usability tester or something; if there's a way to misinterpret or overlook some option in a computer program, he'll find it.)
I tend to agree, and I've had the same experiences [1]. Still, isn't this exactly how I look to neurotypicals in terms of social knowledge? Couldn't they just as well say, "You don't know how to do small talk? Gee, just try different things until it works!"?
[1] On the first day of Kindergarten, I ruined the lesson plan by being able to decipher "Welcome to Kindergarten" written in cursive on the blackboard, since (as my mom explained later) the lesson plan depended on the whole class not knowing what it meant, and "Kindergarteners don't know cursive". I didn't, of course, but I knew enough heuristics to guess it's probable meaning.
This could only possibly work if the person you're talking to is an NPC, I should think. A real person may, e.g., stop talking to you if insulted, or grow bored with your attempts.